Lungren Offers Plan to Apply State’s Successes

Atty. Gen. Dan Lungren laid out the broad parameters of his expected campaign for governor Tuesday, suggesting that California’s successful fight against crime offers a model for addressing issues from welfare reform to improving schools.

The common thread, Lungren said in a speech to Los Angeles Town Hall, is a need “to restore the principle of personal responsibility and accountability.”

“If we had made as much progress in other areas as we did in public safety, think how high our SAT scores might be,” Lungren said. “Or how much we could have shrunk our caseload for welfare, and how many more jobs we might have created.”

Rejecting arguments that changing demographics were key to the decline in crime, Lungren credited the improvement in large part to the policies of the two most recent Republican governors, who “turned away from excuse-making and began holding criminals accountable for their crimes.”

At the same time, Lungren said, Californians began using their powers in the voting booth and lobbying in Sacramento to force a crackdown on sexual predators, promote victims’ rights and, most dramatically, pass the state’s tough three-strikes anti-crime initiative.

Posing a rhetorical question, Lungren asked, “Why shouldn’t we believe that with the same strategy of instilling personal responsibility and mobilizing an army of concerned citizens, we can bring up our kids’ grades, help people break free of dependency, rebuild our infrastructure, pursue both our environmental and economic goals?” In offering crime-fighting as the overarching theme of his candidacy, Lungren played to one of his strongest suits as the state’s chief law enforcement officer, particularly at a time when crime has fallen dramatically in California.

Ironically, however, that reduction in crime has lessened public safety as an issue and pushed other concerns, most notably education, to the forefront.

Lungren’s attempt to introduce the principles of fighting crime to the problems of schools and welfare reform seemed an effort to broaden his public image and expand his political appeal.

Sounding other redoubtable Republican themes, the attorney general called for lower taxes, smaller government, efforts to “reinvigorate fatherhood and the family unit” and a move toward “restoring faith and values” to government.

However, Lungren did not say in his half-hour speech how he would pursue those goals, or implement his notion of applying crime-fighting strategies to meet California’s “other pressing challenges.”

Afterward, he told reporters that his remarks were purposely broad and thematic, as he sought “to connect different pieces of the campaign that might otherwise be disparate--welfare reform, criminal justice, reorganization of state government.”